beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

I have tinnitus. I've pretty much always had tinnitus, apparently: there's always been these tones ringing when there's no external sound. I assumed everyone heard them, since people talk about what they hear in an anechoic chamber, and there's always been this folk idea of sound just naturally generated by your neurons working or whatever.

My father has tinnitus, a relic of his military service, so to me it was always something that kept you from hearing the beeping of a watch alarm. Nothing dramatic has ever happened to my hearing: no habits of over-loud concerts or headphones, no heedless use of firearms. When I was in grade school, on July 4th down at the beach, I was standing maybe 20 or 30 feet from a detonating M-80 firecracker; while it's given me a lifelong healthy respect for the power of explosions, I don't recall my hearing changing. I had constant awful earaches as a kid, so maybe that's related to the tones? There's also a bunch of somatic stuff that comes with my package of brain wiring, and I'm just learning it still, so this could be in there.

Then, a couple years back, a new, lower tone appeared. Well, says me, that's never happened before. I should go get my hearing checked! The doctor said my ears looked fine, and passed me on to the audio technician for a detailed test.

Now, tinnitus is kind of a shitty phenomenon, because unless you've got one of a sparse handful of uncommon medical conditions, the treatment is basically to deploy coping strategies so it doesn't bother you so much. It would sometimes be maddening as a kid, because I couldn't get away from it. Telling this story to my therapist the other day, I realized that's probably where I developed the habit of falling asleep to music or a tape of old radio shows (Abbott & Costello and Burns & Allen were favorites). It gives my attention something to focus on outside my head, which is pretty much the standard of treatment anyway. Meditation let me further adjust my cognitive response, so when a new tone pops up–there's a type that comes and then fades eventually–I can sort of...embrace and absorb it, I guess. Really, I have no idea what's going on.

Except for the mental experience of it, I don't think the tones have affected my daily life. They don't obviously mask sounds in the environment, or hinder my musicianship, even on instruments like voice and violin, where you can only tune by ear. It mostly comes up when I'm trying to pinpoint a faint sound, and I have to decide if I'm actually hearing the faint sound, or if it's just the tones, or some other auditory hallucination.

You know what plays a bunch of faint sounds for you and tells you to signal if you hear one? Yep. A hearing test.

I was driving the poor woman nuts, I think. I'd be trying to distinguish if there was a sound in the headphones, and she'd say things like "Just press the button if you hear a tone," and my explanation didn't make any sense to her. When it was finally done, she showed me the graph showing the ordinary hearing loss for someone my age. Somewhere in there, she said I had tinnitus.

I looked at her blankly, and said, "Really? I thought I just had those tones."

She stared at me like I was an idiot (which happens less often than one might reasonably expect), and said, slowly, "If you hear a sound. Which is not coming from the environment. That. Is tinnitus."

And people wonder why I never go to the doctor.

Ironically, I can talk a lot about listening.

I don't really enjoy poetry any more than the average modern American (which is very little indeed), but the Zen teacher Ryushin Paul Haller read this one by Mary Oliver at a retreat long ago, and it stuck:

Praying

It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

To listen is to change. We take in words or actions, we try to understand them, we evaluate them. Another person's expression becomes part of our world, our memory. Ourselves. Many times, when we have a hard time listening, we are having a hard time changing. We may not even recognize that there's something in ourselves that we want to stay frozen in place.

Maybe another's words light a fire inside us, sparking zealotry or passion or determination. Or they rub us the wrong way, and our mind rises up in opposition. Maybe our opinion or viewpoint changes as we make space for the ideas and feelings of others.

The most sparse and bare outcome of listening is just to update our understanding of the speaker. Part of being human is that we have a shorthand model of everything and everyone we encounter. It helps us navigate the world. We can get stuck if we forget that the people in our head is not real. Anna and J and I know each other exceptionally well, but we are full of surprises.

Speak, and you change in the telling. Listen, and you change in the hearing.

The changing is the important part.